Lessons learned from 12 experiments with 3,315 teens

Hello Real Talk community,

We've been busy! We are preparing for our next build phase to finish out our Innovation Next grant and have been prototyping and experimenting with teens across the U.S. to gather feedback about our current beta app. In fact, in the first quarter (Q1) of this year alone, we conducted 12 experiments with 3,515 teen users. Please see the infographic below for results and lessons learned.

Now that we know that publishing 3 stories per day improves retention and engagement compared to publishing 1 story per day, we will focus our efforts to improve our story submission process so that we can crowdsource more content to support this increased rate.

In the month of March, females submitted 59% of the stories in our app, males submitted 38%, and non-conforming/non-binary teens submitted 3%. Among the stories submitted, 39% of them referenced a LGBTQ+ experience like the story below.

In the end of 6th grade I realized I was attracted to both Male and Female. It scared me at first and I thought it was wrong to think that way since kids who had come out prior to when I did were always bullied about it. I kept it a secret until the end of the summer when I decided to tell my cousin. I want to tell my cousin because she is in high school and I knew that she would be understanding. I pulled her aside and took her into the backyard where no one was. I told her, “I have something to tell you.” She replied, “Okay what is it.” I said straight up, “I’m bisexual.” She said, “Oh really? I thought you were completely gay tbh.” We both laughed and she hugged me and said, “Does anyone else know” And I replied, “No. And I don’t plan to tell anyone anytime soon” she nodded and zipped her mouth. We are extremely close and I am completely out and happy as can be that I didn’t wait until I was older. -- Male, 13

In the next few weeks, we look forward to building out and testing new functions in our app. We'll be in touch again soon as we look for teens to provide us with feedback on these new updates. As always, please reach out to Liz (liz@myhealthed.org) if you have any questions or comments about this blog post.